


so real in the dark

by hulklinging



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Corn Fields, Gender Exploration, Multi, Other, Polyamory Negotiations, Road Trips, Sharing Clothes, Trans Character, thrift stores
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-07 20:59:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12849417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hulklinging/pseuds/hulklinging
Summary: It's like some John Hughes film. Only queerer, and with more clothes sharing. The coming of age part is all the same, though.





	so real in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt 'is that my shirt?'
> 
> Title is from Don't You, by Simple Minds.

The first time it happens, it’s an accident.

It’s somewhere between cornfields and civilization, following the tracks traced on another one of Gansey’s old maps. Blue doesn’t mind, because she’s never been anywhere, so everything is new, and Henry still feels like he’s somehow cheated his way into the best third-wheeling road trip he could have asked for, and he wouldn’t do anything to jinx it.

So they’re going nowhere, which means Blue can go as fast as she wants. Sometimes they end up in towns when it gets dark and they start to get tired, but sometimes there’s nothing in sight. Henry has watched enough horror movies to know sleeping in a corn field is not a terribly intelligent idea, but him and Blue decide that they’re a really terrible cast for a slasher story, and they’ve already beaten one demon. A killer with a scythe is a little less scary, on the far side of it all.

“Horror movies are always sexist, anyways,” Blue complains. They’re on their backs on the hood of the Pig, her and Henry. Gansey is sitting by himself on the back bumper, and they’ve given him five more minutes of quiet before they go and pull him out of his silence. He needs space like this, to collect his thoughts and remind himself he’s still living. Just not too much time, or he’ll get morose, and there’s none of that allowed on this roadtrip, no ma'am.

“Racist, too,” Henry chimes in, and Blue hums her agreement. Then as one they turn around and climb over the cab of the Pig, playing the monsters as they descend on their third.

Getting changed for the new day is a little bit of a production, when you’re sharing a car with two others, when two of them are dating and three of them are falling in love. It’s being as quick as possible, tucking towels into windows to play at privacy, and sometimes it’s putting on the first thing you grab and not realizing it’s not yours until after you’ve emerged.

“Is that my shirt?”

Henry looks down at his shirt, which is bright purple and collared and a bit wide in the shoulders, if he’s being honest. They’d woken up early and dressed in the dark, and he hadn’t noticed - or maybe, if he’s being more honest with himself, he noticed but didn’t want to change. Gansey’s shirt makes him feel warmer than any designer polo has a right to, and usually he’s so particular about the fit of his clothes but if they’re not technically his clothes it doesn’t really feel like it matters so much.

“Oh, nice spot, my good man!” And Henry has the shirt halfway over his head before Gansey can blink. In hoping to hide the redness of his own cheeks, he misses Gansey’s blush too. Blue doesn’t, tucks it away into the growing list of little moments she carries inside her ribs. Special ones, ones with no name yet but she’s working on that, and once she has a name she thinks she’ll say it out loud, just to taste it on her tongue. But for now, she just watches.

“You can keep it on,” Gansey says, almost casual enough to be mistaken for President Gansey. But out here President Gansey stands out even more so than a flustered one, and Henry, eternally hopeful, takes it as a good sign.

It starts as an honest mistake, but when Henry wakes up late the next morning to see Blue wearing one of his Madonna shirts as a rather scandalous dress, he can feel something changing. Gansey lets Blue and Henry put some of Blue’s clips into his hair, Blue delights in how Gansey’s salmon shorts look a little less clean cut on her own frame, and one night finds them all gathered around their motel’s streaky mirror as Henry talks them through one of his favourite smoky eye tutorials. They don’t really blend into each other - none of them could be mistaken for either of the two, after all - but they collide and pick off parts of each other, like wearing a lover’s perfume.

In one tiny town just over the border, they get drunk together for the first time. When they wake up, tangled together in one small tent, they’re all wearing Blue’s purple lipstick, on lips and eyelids and fingertips. Blue declares it a special occasion and makes them all chokers out of the pulltabs. She still doesn’t have a name for what they are, but she thought she almost heard it, in the whispered confessions that had made the air heavy between them the night before. By the looks in her boys’ eyes, they heard it too.

“Things are b… Better in threes,” Henry says, and it would sound just like it had before if not for how shaky his smile looked, how delicately he held himself, how the pause between the first attempt at ‘better’ and the second stretched just a moment too long. It’s a question, hiding as a statement.

Gansey looks at her, and she nods, and Gansey smiles, really smiles, and she wants to shout to the world about this boy, who died twice and has still discovered how to live. But instead she just nods again, and Gansey grabs Henry’s hands with his own, and Blue squeezes herself between them for good measure, and Henry’s eyes are closed, like he feels like he can’t watch this moment, even though there was really only one way this was ever going to go.

“Things are better in threes,” Gansey repeats, and there’s no question, not this time, and if Henry sags for a moment with relief, none of them choose to comment on it. They were there to hold him up, after all.

There are a few things that are off limits, at first. Blue’s favourite tank top, the one with the built in breast forms. Gansey’s binder, watch. Henry’s phone. Talking too much about what happens after the roadtrip, or about families, because of the three of them only one of them has a family that understands unconventional things like this. They bump into each other’s walls often, sometimes carelessly, and if one of them is angry then all of them sleep apart, because it’s only fair. This leads to dreary mornings, everyone with a little less colour, making sure to only wear what they brought with them. But it never lasts for long. And it’s in these moments, as they trip over each other’s insecurities and secrets like new colts still learning how to walk, that they surprise themselves too.

“Oh,” says Henry, the first time he accidentally grabs Blue’s tank top. He looks down at his chest, eyebrows scrunched together, mouth moving but no words coming out.

It’s another feeling to find words for, but neither Gansey nor Blue pressure him over it, just hold him close and let him know to let them know what he needs, whether it’s new words or clothes or just this, the two of them crowding him in and holding him close.

Henry says it’s fine, but it’s not long before Blue ‘accidentally’ rips one of Gansey’s shirts and declares they could all use some replacement clothes, anyway. Gansey’s immediately looking up options on his phone, and Henry’s got a website pulled up, but Blue shakes her head and drives them to the weirdest, sketchiest thrift store she can find. They all laugh so hard their ribs are sore, and clothes shopping, which had once been something each of them dreaded for different reasons, becomes a new tradition. They don’t always buy clothes (although they always buy something, even if it’s just as an apology for the loudness they bring with them), but they try things on, pick things out for themselves and each other. The lines between them grow even more blurred, even as they themselves grow more defined.

“This is quintessential coming of age material,” Henry says. They’re sitting on the hood of the car again, and Blue is trying to braid Henry’s hair, and Henry is painting Gansey’s toenails with the brightest, most horrendous yellow, a treasure he picked up in a dollar store a couple hundred miles behind them. “This is John Hughes’ America, right here.”

“You’re not even American,” Blue teases, and Henry tips his head back so he can stick his tongue out at her.

“Doesn’t mean I can’t throw my fist in the air as the credits roll. I thought your country was all about equal opportunities?”

“Not my country.”

Both of them look at Gansey, like they want him to weigh in on their discussions of classic coming of age Americana. He blinks up at them, his glasses making his eyes look over-bright and otherworldly.

“I’m afraid I can’t weigh in,” he says after a moment, and goes back to his book, but he’s smiling and his eyes aren’t moving, so he’s only playing at being dismissive. “After all, I am merely a - how did you put it the other day, Jane? - merely a seventy two year old professor in a frat boy’s body.”

Blue snorts and reaches over Henry’s half finished hair to take a swipe at Gansey’s book. He starts, not expecting this attack, and in trying to escape this assault from above he scooches too far and falls right off of the Pig with a very undignified squawk. Blue’s giggles are those ones that happen when one’s not sure if they’re allowed to laugh or not, and Henry slides forward to lean over the edge of the car, face a perfect mask of concern.

“Should have listened to those infomercials! This is exactly the kind of situation Lifealert was made for!”

Gansey’s arm reaches up and grabs a fistful of his own purple polo shirt, and uses it to yank Henry down. Henry screams, and Gansey lets out an oooph! as Henry comes down right on top of him, and Blue’s full on cackling at them now, even as she grabs for the nail polish to make sure it doesn’t end up smeared all over the Pig’s paint.

“Help, Blue! The old man’s got me!”

“Jane, some assistance, I’m being crushed!”

Blue stares down at both of them, shaking her head. “Don’t make me turn this car around,” she threatens, affection heavy in each word.

They don’t know what to call this, just yet. But that’s okay. There’s still so much world to cover, so many new places to see and languages to learn. They’ll find it eventually. There’s no rush.


End file.
